Friedrich Schwally
Friedrich Zacharias Schwally (10 August 1863 – 5 February 1919) was a German Orientalist with professorships at Strasbourg, Gießen and Königsberg.
[2] After his father's death in a railway accident when he was six years old, Schwally attended the Volksschule and Höhere Bürgerschule (literally Higher Citizen's School) in Butzbach.
But for an important event that followed, Schwally's life may have taken the traditional career path of an Old Testament scholar in a Theology Faculty.
This was not because of the standard of Schwally's work but because that the conclusions and implications of his thesis and its methodology, were unpalatable to his Halle examiners' conservative theology.
This controversial work in English is, "Life after death according to the ideas of ancient Israel and Judaism, including Popular Beliefs in the Age of Christ", and was published as a book in 1892.
[4][5] Schwally's love of Semitic languages led him to the University of Strasbourg in 1892 to again become a student of the leading German Orientalist of his time, Professor Dr. Theodor Nöldeke.
[7] He took private lessons in the methods of Koran translation and immersed himself in the local language and culture by living in Arab households.
In 1906 he was offered, but declined, a full professorship in a newly created chair in Arabic at the privately operated Islamic Aligarh University in India.
About this time Schwally also became a member[11] of a newly formed society for the study of contemporary Islam, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Islamkunde E.V., founded by Professor Martin Hartmann in Berlin on 9 January 1912.
In 1915, he contributed to a 70th Birthday tribute book for Professor Eduard Sachau, with whom he had had a long association as a part of the "Berlin School".
Schwally undertook several research trips[12] including to Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Palmyra, Jerusalem, Beirut, Istanbul, Paris, London, Leiden.
Apart from his love of nature and the outdoors life, Schwally took a linguistic interest in the many dialects and accents of people he encountered on his holiday travels.
One of Schwally's books was dedicated to his friends, Ignaz Goldziher in Budapest and Christian Snouck Hurgronje in Leiden, with whom he had collaborated.
(The 1st Edition was published in German in 1860 based on a previously written prize winning essay by Nöldeke in a French competition.)
Schwally is also widely published in other areas of Old Testament, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Islam together with a seminal paper on the topic of Holy War.
His 1901 monograph Der heilige Krieg im alten Israel, was the first single comprehensive treatment of the topic, following on from prior work by Wellhausen and others.
His 1912 publication, Beitraege zur Kenntnis des Lebens der Mohammedanischen Staedter, Fellachen und Beduinen im heutigen Aegypten and the 1916 journal article Der heilige Krieg des Islams in religionsgeschichtlicher und staatsrechtlicher Beleuchtung are examples of this.
